University Police Eject Man From Winthrop House

NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED
September 30, 1965

University police last night stopped a salesman from distributing questionnaires in Winthrop House for a computer dating service much like Operation Match.

Although University police would release no information about the incident, a witness, John P. Bachner '66, reported that the salesman identified himself to police as David DeWan. DeWan an M.I.T. graduate student, is the president and sole owner of "Contact," an enterprise which has reportedly collected 2000 completed questionnaires from Boston college students this fall.

Interviewed last night before his reported appearance in Winthrop House, DeWan said his organization charged $4 for supplying five to ten names of "ideal" dates.

DeWan called the Operation Match questionnaire "less sophisticated, appealing to the big, Mid-west universities." He said that under Contact's "two-way matches" which he described as an improvement over Operation Match, a student would be the "ideal" date of the person whose name he received and that that person would also be the student's ideal date.

The Contact man found in Winthrop last night reportedly told University police that he did not know that he had to have a permit to distribute the questionnaires in the Houses, saying that he had distributed the questionnaires at M.I.T. without one.

An Operation Match executive said last night that a similar fate befell a Contact questionnaire distributor last week at Yale.